Why do we care so much?

I was standing in the petrol station today, waiting to pay and I found myself talking to the lady standing behind me. She had in her hands four boxes of cakes and two large bags of Imperial mints. I said to her that the cakes looked nice and she was making me hungry, she said that it would take her months to eat them because she was on a diet. The lady standing in front of me then said that she knew how she felt as she was also on a diet - Weight Watchers- and yesterday had emptied her kitchen cupboards of everything that wasn't 'healthy'. It made me think, why are we all so obsessed with how we look - we are never skinny enough, never pretty enough, never brown enough e.t.c. Neither of these women were large, they were normal, curvaceous, beautiful women - not everyone was born to be skinny. Our society has become so obsessed with celebrity and the endorsement of the so called 'perfect' image in magazine's that we never feel good enough. I am not entirely blaming magazines or the media for this, I think that we all need a reality check and need to learn to realise that these pictures are not real life; except ourselves for who we are and learn to love our imperfections. We are human - our imperfections are beautiful, lets learn to embrace them.

A New Beginning.

I've decided to learn how to meditate. I know it sounds a bit 'other world' and out there but I really need to learn to chill out and stay calm. I've also decided to start practising hatha yoga and have emailed a teacher local to me to find out some infromation on it. I need to be careful because I have torn ligaments in my lower back and I don't want to make the problem worse.
Next week I begin my 'busy time'! Have three days work expreience at the BBC in Birmingham and then it's off to London for two weeks work experience at Now magazine. I'm really excited about going, everything I am going to learn and making a good impression - I'm not finishing that sentence with 'hopefully' because my New Years resolution is to be more positive! If I'm being honest, I am a little daunted by it all. I am going to miss my boyfriend like crazy and will cry my eyes out when he leaves me to get the train home on my first day.I'm confident experiencing this will make me stronger though - and give him a chance to play on his X-Box! Living in London for two weeks on my own is going to be an amazing experience and I will learn a great deal about myself. I plan to sort my mind out while I am there. By that I mean clear away all of the worry and tension that is floating around in there now and become more confident in myself. I am going to return home as a new person - confident, happier and, most importantly, calm.

Consumerism Gone Mad.

Over the Christmas holidays it struck me how, as a society, we have all become crazed with excess, in every sense. I work part-time at a shopping centre whilst studying for my degree and it amazed me over the weeks leading up to Christmas and the week of Christmas of how insatible the genreal public's appetite is for consumerism. There were many times late on an evening when myself and my collageues would have to physically push people out of the door so that we could close the shop. On Boxing Day our shop was flooded with people, haggling for discounts, moaning at the length of the queue they had had to wait in and then being obnoxious and rude to staff. Why is it that life cannot stop for just a few days? Surely we all deserve some calm in the hectic running of day-to-day life?
I remember when I was little - four or five years old - when Christmas was a time for family gatherings, reconnecting with loved-ones and recharging those much needed lowered batteries. In modern society it seems that life has become overly busy, excessively stressful and, as a result, full of increasingly rude people.
Last year (how odd that sounds on January 4th!) I promised myself that I would have a stress-free relaxing Christmas, but I ended getting so stressed I made myself ill. Next year I plan to remove myself from that stress and go away for the week before Christmas. Myself and my boyfriend on our own somewhere quiet - where all the shops close on a Sunday!